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iCloud Fever: Apple Cloud Surges Past 100 Million Users

While it’s a bit of a mind-bender to think of Apple as a victim of anything, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a story yesterday that almost made it sound like the company had become a victim of its own success.

As more and more people began to share more and more music and photos across more and more Apple gadgets, Cook said, the process syncing up all that content across all those i-things had “become a hair-pulling exercise.”

“It recognizes that in the last 2-3 years, we live off multiple devices. It’s no longer a great customer experience to have to sync your iPad to your Mac and then your iPhone to your Mac and then resync your iPad to your Mac.”

And to prove his point, Cook revealed the latest in a recent series of performance metrics from Apple that are simply jaw-dropping:

iCloud recognizes the Mac or PC as just another device and now your life is a lot easier. We have 100 million users of iCloud — we just launched it in October! This is unbelievable.

That’s 100 million iCloud users in four months, or about 25 million per month—and that’s coming awfully close to 1 million new iClouders every single day. That pace will surely level off at some point (won’t it?), but Cook said the core idea behind the iCloud will endure for at least a decade—which, in Apple years, is a very long time.

“I view iCloud not as something with a year or two product life—it’s a strategy for the next decade or more,” Cook said. “It’s truly profound.”

On the enterprise side, the impact from the iCloud will be felt in a couple of ways: first, it’s simply impossible to understate the gravitational impact Apple has on not only its own industry but also on those of its customers: think of the music business, the book business, the media business, iPads in hospitals, the demise of Kodak.

In that context, Apple’s raging success with iCloud could change the thinking of many CEOs and other business leaders who until recently harbored some reservations about the riskiness of this whole “cloud computing” thing for their businesses. If it’s good enough for Apple, they’re likely to think, then why not for us?

In addition, think back to Cook’s comment about how the formerly cool process of syncing one device to another eventually became not-so-cool and then rapidly devolved to “a hair-pulling exercise.”

Once again, the repercussions of that outsized Apple Impact (it’s kind of like a reality-distortion field, except reality isn’t just distorted—it is truly changed) will be profound as many millions of people will become less tolerant of the hair-pulling exercises they have to endure as their engagements with technology extend to increasingly wider swaths of their daily lives.

This whole syncing thing is going to become the next Six Sigma battleground: if you’re a bank, your customers’ mobile banking records better be in perfect real-time harmony with those on their PCs and your ATMs.

How about inventory management: do you have a single instance of truth throughout your operations, or various shades of it? Better sync up—or else your customers as well as your employees will gradually begin to notice, and they’re going to wonder what the heck’s wrong with you.

Because Apple’s conditioned them to stop pulling their hair out, and to simply switch to a superior alternative.

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